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Sunday, July 1, 2012

L’auteurist americain: Deceased Artiste Andrew Sarris (part two)

The American Cinema remains Sarris’ most important statement as a critic, but he
did continue to make some very interesting arguments in the Seventies. Of
course, he seemed to remain in conflict with the radical brand of modernism
that ran through the best work of that decade. I remember that his review of
Godard’s Ici et Ailleurs (1976) read as an
apology, since Sarris was throwing up his hands and admitting that he found the
movie unpleasant because he had too much liberal guilt to ever praise a movie
about the Palestinians, no matter how masterfully it had been constructed.

At the time I began to
read Sarris’ column in the Voice on a regular basis he was
at war with those who enjoyed the work of Brian De Palma (this was around the
time of Dressed to Kill and Blow-Out).
His writings on Hitchcock were always inspired, but his take on De Palma was
that the latter’s films were just such blatant ripoffs of Hitch that you
*couldn’t* like them if you were a Hitchcock fan (he actually that in one
column — you could NOT like those films if you liked Hitch’s original
thrillers). In this regard, Sarris sounded like the teenage guardian of a fan
club — “you can’t love the Stones if you’re a Beatlemaniac!!!”

When I was in
high school, I was a “junior intern” for the Voice critic
Tom Allen. Tom was an odd gentleman, a Catholic Brother who lived in a rectory
but also worked for one of the most liberated alternative newspapers in NYC (at
that time) as he adhered to extremely conservative politics (I remember being
told once by Tom that Al Haig was the only thing standing between us and a
Soviet invasion).

Tom's moods were ever-changing — he could be an
exceptionally nice gent one minute, and then verbally cut you to the quick for
no apparent reason the next. Tom’s major bailwick at the
Voice was to keep a very “deep” collection of Sarris’
reviews, which he was editing down for a potential book of capsule reviews,
which was never published. The densely worded capsules appeared in a column called “Revivals in Focus.”

While juggling his two "lives," Tom also wrote for the newspaper you see to your right, The Long Island Catholic (I utilize that image since apparently not a single picture of him appears on the Net). His other central project
in the Voice office was to keep a file cabinet’s-worth of
folders containing info on American filmmakers — the ones that had sprung up
after The American Cinema and the ones that had been left
out (mostly B-level directors, but some who had made very notable films; Lloyd
Bacon springs to mind). The reason for this file cabinet was the very necessary
and work-intensive “update” of the book that Tom assured me was imminent.

I assume that the debilitating illness that Sarris suffered in the early Eighties distracted him
from the long-discussed (by Tom, at least) second volume of The American
Cinema. His wife, the critic Molly Haskell, wrote a book about
Sarris’ illness (Love and Other Infectious Diseases: a
Memoir); she also suffered health problems that consumed him at one
point.

As the years went
by, I would check in bookstores to see if he had done any appreciable update to
the book, and — nothing. The only addition to the later paperback version was an article Sarris wrote for the
July-August 1977 issue of American Film magazine called “The
Auteur Theory Revisited.” It was written to respond to an anti-auteurist
article by Gore Vidal that had appeared in the April issue of that magazine,
which had touted the contribution of the scripter (an obvious belief for a
writer who worked as a screenwriter at various times in his career).

In the ’77
article Sarris maintains that he wishes he could “reformulate the auteur theory with a
greater emphasis on the tantalizing mystery of style than on the romantic agony
of the artists.” He maintains that he believes a filmmaker’s statements about
his/her film made in interviews should be ignored, and only the work should be
considered.

I remain
fascinated by the fact that Sarris never chose to return to The
American Cinema in the 44 years since its publication. If a volume
two wasn’t in the cards, at least a cleaned-up, amplified, and revised version
of the initial book could’ve been delivered. Since the book has remained in
print, and pages from it are in fact available on Google books, it will be odd to see
Sarris’ misguided slam of Billy Wilder go down in perpetuity, when all he had
to do was write a handful of new entries, augment some of the older ones, and
let Allen clean up the rest.

The
only information I could find on the Internet that offered any insight as to
why Sarris was content to let his best-known book sit forever as it was is,
self-confessed errors intact, appears in the heartfelt and extremely touching
obituary written
by his friend and colleague Richard Corliss (whose work in print is wonderful,
but his pieces written exclusively for the time.com website are truly sublime).

I
waited to read Corliss’ take on Sarris until I had this piece completed, and
then was interested to learn that Corliss surmises that Sarris eventually
looked on the book as “a creature of its time” that was corrected and
overwritten by his later articles.

******

To put it in the
purest metaphorical light, Sarris remains a sort of a father figure for
American film reviewers of a certain age. Like Hitchcock, you have to study his
work, acknowledge his presence, and then decide if you’re going to use his
approach, or fashion a new one of your own. I don’t know if he was ever asked
about his criticism being art of a kind, but when he was at his best he wove
words in a wondrous way (oh no, I’m surrendering to Sarrisian alliteration!).

Interestingly,
one of the nicer tributes to Sarris, on the TCM Movie Morlocks blog cemented
the notion that his most influential writing occurred solely in the Sixties —
although I *really* love his statement about Aldrich’s women’s wrestling
picture All the Marbles (the National Theater wasn’t
that bad — but maybe I just like gutter trash). Like many
artists, Sarris did his seminal work early on — he remained a brilliant writer,
but how many worlds can you change in one career? (One would be sufficient for
most of us.)

As noted above, I
disagree with a number of Sarris’ stances, but he was the guy who wrote one of
the “guidebooks” for writing American film criticism, and, as much as they
are/were entertaining, Sarris was always leagues smarter than TV-friendly movie
experts like Siskel and Ebert, and that man on the couch, Robert Osborne.

Although I
confess that I didn’t keep up at all with what Sarris was writing for
The New York Observer in recent years, he has remained a
touchstone on the Funhouse TV show and in this blog. I find that I use various
expressions of his in my writing and on the show, including “a subject for
further research,” the “Mount Everest of modern cinema” comment he made about
Berlin Alexanderplatz, and the gangly but incisive
“comedy/ha-ha vs. comedy/not tragedy.”

In researching
this tribute, I rediscovered that one of the phrases I have always thought was
Sarris’ (because I first read it in The American Cinema) is
a terrifically pithy analysis he attributes in the book to British film critic
Mark Shivas (who edited the magazine Movie and later became
a producer of great telefilms for BBC): “Welles is concerned with the ordinary
feelings of extraordinary people and Hitchcock with the extraordinary feelings of
ordinary people.” (A remarkable insight that makes you start thinking about
which category your own favorite artists fall into.)

*************

Since
I like to close my DA tributes with clips of the person profiled, I turn once
again to the hub of all Net activity, YouTube. The representation of Sarris on
that site is sparse but fascinating. First, there are pieces of computer
animation like this one that seem to want to make his
feud with Kael more exciting (and make him a sexist villain) for a younger
generation that probably has no idea who either of them are. (And does anyone
have any idea what this
piece of stupidity is about, besides inebriation?)

Imitation is the
sincerest form of flattery, and I only know of one gentleman who ever “played”
Sarris: John Candy, in a sketch on one of the earlier seasons of the sublime
SCTV. Candy isn’t doing much of an impression here (and
they’ve got Sarris hating Gone With the Wind, which was one
of his all-time faves), but I guess since Candy was the burliest guy in the
cast, and so he got to portray Sarris.

As always with
SCTV, the fact that they were even doing a sketch where each
member of the ensemble played a noted film critic makes the sketch fascinating
as a one-off. (This was the first of two swipes they took at Kael; the second
one is even more mind-boggling — her evaluation “Midnight Cowboy, Part 2” on
“Monster Chiller Horror Theater.”)

Here is footage
of Sarris talking with J. Hoberman and Dennis Lim after a screening of
Bresson’s perfect Au Hasard Balthazar. (Again, Bresson was
pretty modernist and minimalist, so Sarris was not a massive fan of his work.)
By this point in late 2006, Sarris had decided that his three favorite films
were Rules of the Games, Ugetsu, and The
Earrings of Madame de…. For his part Hoberman mentions being inspired
by listening to Sarris’ radio show on WBAI:

There is one very
good one-on-one video interview with Sarris. Shot recently, with Sarris seeming
to be in somewhat shaky condition (but still brilliant), he states outright
that he had abandoned the notion of a pantheon and that his taste had opened
up.

When asked to
cite a newer filmmaker, he spotlights Funhouse favorite Wong Kar-Wai, which
proves he had come very far, since WKW’s heroes are the very filmmakers Sarris
had so much trouble processing in the Sixties. Also interesting: his account of
writing a screenplay for the film Justine that was never
used.

Like all
reviewers, Sarris was always at his best when being brutal or writing a
reverie. One of the subjects he returned to time and again was Vivien Leigh.
She isn’t one of my obsessions, but I thought it would be nice to include one
of the many fan-generated video montages to her to close out this piece.

The only one of
the literally hundreds of wildly dense capsules that appeared in the
Sarris/Allen “Revivals in Focus” column that I can remember found Sarris noting
that he’d seen That Hamilton Woman over and over again as a
young man, smitten as he was with Ms. Leigh. (I didn’t get it then, I still
don’t, but I respected the fixation.)

Oddly, there are
tributes to Leigh that are scored to Nat King Cole, Allison Crowse, Leonard
Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” Sarah MacLachlan doing the Beatles’ “Blackbird,” the
wonderful Belle and Sebastian, and even Eighties fave “Take on Me” (!). I
decided to go with this demure and quite nice item scored to classical music:

******

Sarris’ passing
brings on a major bout of nostalgia for the days when trend-setting movie
critics wrote about films that were destined to be around for a long time to
come. These days, with the exception of some wonderful paeans delivered by the
likes of Scorsese and Wenders, younger film fans are swayed mostly by the
recommendations of filmmakers like Tarantino, who tout genre films that are
often superb, but are more often flashy and memorable but devoid of brains or
heart.

In The
American Cinema Sarris remarked that the auteur critic “risks the
resentment of the reader by constantly judging the present in terms of the
past. The auteur critic must overcome this resentment by relating the past to
the present in the most meaningful way possible.”

His next sentence
noted that “fortunately, readers are becoming more… knowledgeable about the
past with each passing year.” That is certainly not the case these days, when
b&w films are considered a niche affair available on only one cable channel
and, though many amazing films are available on DVD, most folks are checking
out whatever’s most easily available on Netflix or iTunes or Hulu or…

I’ll close with
one last statement of Sarris’ that ranks among the many single-sentence
declarations of his that will ring true forever. Trashing Fred Zinnemann, he
said, “In cinema, as in all art, only those who risk the ridiculous have a real
shot at the sublime.”

1 comment:

"People have asked me if I intend to update my categories in the American Cinema Compilations of 1963 and 1968. The answer is no. My Pantheon directors are secure. If I could go back in time I would add Leo McCarey, Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder. I would add a new category for dissonant, against-the-grain temperaments like John Huston, William Wellman, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah. In the polemical 1960s I underrated more directors than I overrated.... Another new category if I could go back in time: The Objet d'Art Directors: William Wyler, Carol Reed, Rouben Mamoulian, Jack Clayton, Rene Clair, Rene Clement, David Lean."

This brief essay with its notebook-like reflections on auteurism, Kael, his favorite foreign films, the writers his criticism was most indebted to, and various charming asides ("I prefer Michael Powell's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp to Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. I prefer Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons to Kane. Why? The respective treatments of women.") should be the preface for all future editions of The American Cinema.

It's also worth noting (not mentioned in your otherwise marvelous memorial posts) that Sarris did, in a sense, revisit The American Cinema, by way of the volume You Ain't Heard Nothing Yet published in 1998. That is where readers can turn, for instance, for his mea culpa on Billy Wilder, but also for expanded thoughts and reconsiderations of several directors (pre-1950). Here, too, he included entries on meaningful actors and actresses, studios, and genres. Plus appendices full of several new lists.